“Get him cleaned up. Rinse him down. Get him some food. Let him piss and finally shit. I’ve got to try something else. The bloody fooker. He must be Irish to have a head or heart that much of steel.”
40
Nick had, for the first time in his life, taken to sleeping in. And why not? He had nowhere to go or be; he was just home, besieged by press, waiting for various accusations and investigations to reach some kind of clarity or resolution.
But that morning, Sally nudged him awake at 7 a.m.
“Umm. Ummphh. Yeah, what?”
“Sweetie, sweetie, wake up. Something’s happened.”
He blinked, rubbed shellac out of his eyes so that they finally cracked open to admit the dawn, and sat up.
“Whattya mean?” he mumbled, his tongue still stuck to the roof of his dry mouth.
She stood by the window, trim in her blue business suit, her horn-rim glasses glinting.
“The vultures,” she said, hooking a thumb to indicate the alien gathering on the lawn, “they’ve tripled. Maybe quadrupled.”
“Kill some of ’em when you back out, will you?” he said.
“I just want to break the foot of that prissy little bitch Jamie whatever. She’s out there, the wan, pale little zombie. She nailed me on the Mason thing with an ambush on the courthouse steps. I still owe her.”
“Really,” Nick said, “it’s much cheaper to kill them. If you just maim them, you have to support them for years. If you kill them, their buddies lose interest in a couple of weeks.”
“Okay, sweetie, have to run. Summary’s at ten thirty. Have a good day.”
“Doubtful.”
She turned and left, hustling with efficiency and purpose. She hadn’t let this thing throw her off one iota and believed that Nick would, as usual, triumph in the end.
He lay there, heard the door slam, the garage door rise, her Volvo ease out as the reporters reluctantly made room, and then she sped off.
Lord God, thought Nick, looking at the now swollen mass camped in the front yard of his home, where they crushed grass to mud, left McDonald’s cups and wrappings everywhere, and annoyed the hell out of the neighbors, though nothing was said, as all of them worked themselves for the gov and knew this sort of thing happened every once in a while. It was what you got for pursuing a career in the town of power.
Nick stumbled into the bathroom, decided to shave for the first time in three days, showered, then climbed into blue jeans, New Balance hikers, and his favorite University of Virginia hoodie. His glasses were where he’d left them, which happened about twice a month; usually the strange men who came in and moved his clothes around in the dark did the same for his glasses. He made it downstairs, turned on the pot she always left prepared, and in a few seconds had himself a nice cup of joe, dead black and steaming, while he watched the news, which didn’t, for once, picture him and bring out breathless updates. These guys outside, they were ahead of the curve then, while local TV was behind or couldn’t get its stand-ups into position quickly enough.
He thought he might let ’em stew; he thought he might go online and read the papers and get the info that way, but after a while, it seemed sort of pointless. He got up, went to the front door-no jog today, too many morons on the front steps-and opened up.
“Nick, Nick, what do you have to say about the Times’s photo?”
“Nick, were you there? Did you let them pay your way? Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Nick, did you just forget about the photo somehow? It slipped your mind or something?”
“Nick, are you going to resign today? Save the Bureau the trouble of putting together charges against you, going through the whole charade, a hearing, that kind of thing?”
“Nick, have you talked to your lawyer yet?”
“Nick, is this like the classic Greek thing, where a mighty hero makes some errors in judgment out of a sense of entitlement and-”
Nick held up his hands, and near-silence briefly alighted on the mob.
“You guys, I can’t comment, I don’t know what the hell you’re even talking about. And no, I haven’t talked to my lawyer because I don’t have one.”
“You’re going to need one now,” it seemed a dozen people said at once, and somehow a copy of the morning’s Times was located, expressed hand-by-hand through the mob, and presented to Nick, who looked into his own face, kneeling, surrounded by two guys said to be FN reps, holding a rifle and looking at a group he’d just shot. It had a terrible familiarity to it but it touched nothing coherent enough to be called a memory.
photo shows fbi agent at gun company, said the headline.
There was-it was the Times, after all-a subhead: “Evidence disputes Memphis’ claim to ‘no prior involvement’ with Belgian firm.”
The byline, of course, was that of David Banjax. The story began,
The New York Times has obtained and authenticated by laboratory examination a photograph showing beleaguered FBI special agent Nicholas M. Memphis at a shooting range owned by a Belgian armsmaker after having tested a new rifle for consideration by the Bureau’s SWAT teams, in contravention of Bureau rules.
Charges have been raised that Memphis, whose stewardship of the famous ‘Peacenik Sniper’ investigation has been called into question, inappropriately attended gun firm functions as the federal investigative agency prepares to decide on a multimillion-dollar sniper rifle contract.
The photograph, which was obtained by the Times’s Washington Bureau, depicts Memphis kneeling with two executives of FN, an international arms company headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. Memphis is displaying a target he has just tested the rifle on, the new FN PSR model, which is to be included in upcoming FBI sniper rifle trials, the winner of which stands to gain not only the agency contract but commercial advantages throughout the world.
“Whoever wins that contract,” said Milton Fieldbrou of EyeOnGovernment.com, a think tank that keeps track of government procurement and its commercial implications beyond the actual monies, “will have a PR bonanza that could spell survival in the troubled firearms industry.”
FBI regulations specifically forbid employees to attend industry sales events, particularly at industry expense, and despite documents that seemed to suggest Mr. Memphis had traveled to the Columbia, S.C., headquarters of FN USA, he has denied any involvement with the company.
Oh Christ, he thought. This is what my good pal and drinking buddy Bill Fedders was warning me about. Not warning. Just telling me to hang on, I was about to get creamed.
He looked at the photo and half-believed he’d been in Columbia, South Carolina, for a second. Who wouldn’t believe it? And how do you prove a negative, in the face of visual evidence so compelling? And who were the two grinners on either side of him? And how the hell had he shot such a great group at three hundred yards?
“Nick, Nick, what do you say?”
“I have no comment at this time,” Nick said, and ducked indoors.
Oh Christ. He sat on the sofa, stared at the photo so long he began to believe it was real. He tried to straighten it out in his mind: did I forget?
But that was insane. Amnesia was for bad movies from the fifties.
It was phony. Yet the goddamn thing had a familiarity to it that haunted him, that rooted it in some sort of previous experience, though he could not place it. The two other men were utter strangers. Then there was the rifle: there was something peculiar about it too, but again his brain couldn’t find the file and yielded no information. He knew one thing: it was a suit day.
He poured himself a cup of coffee, went upstairs, and opened his closet to his festive collection of workplace garments. Hmm, which shade of gray? Okay, he decided, plucking a middle-toned, somewhere-between-destroyer-and-sweatshirt hue, a brilliantly colored white shirt and a tie that was more toward the R than the O of the Roy G. Biv spectrum, and oxfords that were shined up too gleamy to show off that nice shade of black suggesting death, taxes, and cervical cancer. He had the pants on and was buttoning the shirt when the phone rang.